


Soliloquy

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 13:13:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>season seven ficlet. Sam and Dean discuss grief, and 'the one'. mentions of past child abuse (violent) and canonical character death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soliloquy

Dean is in the bathroom too long. Always too long.

He used to do this as a kid; Dean thinks that his brother doesn’t remember, but the images are burned into his mind, like so many others. Dean was silent for a long, long time. Didn’t talk, didn’t even  _communicate;_  not with gesture, not with noise.

Now it seems like things are hardly different; he speaks, sure, but he’s not really  _saying_ anything; and he’s staying in the bathroom too long.

Sam slams his fist on the door. “Dean,” he says, and there is no response from inside.

He doesn’t know what Dean does in there; if he’s sitting in the bath, hands curled around his knees, like Sam used to when he was younger, scared and lonely and lost. Funny how you make yourself alone when it’s the last thing you want to be; Sam bangs on the door again, harder. “Dean!”

There’s a pause; he hears a muted shuffling sound from inside, his brother scrambling. For what, he doesn’t know. The door cracks open after a weighty silence, wherein both boys were probably staring at the same slab of wood; one willing it open, the other willing him to just go away, leave him alone, leave him in  _peace._

But this, for once, is something that Dean has experienced that Sam understands.

Dean’s face appears at the crack in the door.

“Go to bed,” he barks, big brother, parent, to the end. Sam frowns at him.

“What’re you doing?”

“Painting my nails,” Dean snaps, expression drawn and dark; he looks so  _tired._ Sam scrubs a hand over his forehead.

Sam shoulders his way in, almost wincing at how easily Dean gives way. He looks around the room for something that Dean might have been occupying himself with, but there’s nothing. He really was just sitting there in silence. His chest tightens.

“Sit down,” he says, as gently as he can, and Dean fights off his hands when he places them on his shoulders.

“Fuck off, Sammy. Go to bed.”

“No. Sit down.”

Dean acquiesces after a moment of consideration, looking furious and wild as a feral dog. He lowers himself to sit on the edge of the bath, and Sam leans against the sink, not meeting his eyes. He takes a deep breath.

“It gets easier,” he starts, and Dean looks at him so sharply that Sam worries he’s going to get punched.

“No fucking way are you doing this to me,” Dean growls, starting to push himself to his feet. Sam rises, also.

“Dean, please,” he is pleading, now; Dean frowns.

“Sam,” he starts, but Sam fixes him with his eyes; raises his hands. Dean slumps in his seat again. “I know what you’re gonna say,” he mumbles, blurry; Sam wonders if he’s been drinking or if he’s just  _that_ uncomfortable. “It gets better, it’s okay, you remember the good times, blah fucking blah,” Dean closes his eyes tightly and looks down. “But if I’ve learned anything, Sammy, it’s that that’s  _bullshit.”_

Sam finds himself on the edge of anger and tries to swallow it down; he half-manages. “I didn’t say better.  _Easier,”_ he enunciates carefully; Dean still won’t look at him. “I think about Jess every fucking day. If I have a day I  _don’t_ think about her, it makes me feel like a hundred fucking flavours of  _shit.”_

Dean looks at him dully. “Is this supposed to be a pep talk?”

“No,” Sam resists the urge to slap him. Maybe he got that impulse from his dad, somewhere along the line;  _understand me, listen to me,_ and, failing that,  _listen to my violence. Feel outside what I feel within._

He remembers the bruises on his brother’s body, never on his. He closes his eyes; tries not to think of it too much.

“No, it’s not,” he says, having let the pause grow too long. “Not a pep talk. Just saying I’ve fucking been there,” he says quietly, “I know what he was, to you.”

Dean shakes his head so fiercely that he must rattle his own teeth. “You don’t know _anything.”_

Sam shrugs easily. “Maybe not,” he concedes. “But maybe I’d know if you told me.”

Dean is silent. He’s definitely been drinking; maybe that’s what he was doing in here, and the shuffling around was the concealing of bottles; Sam makes a mental note to check the toilet tank for Jack. Dean’s shoulders slant, wavering; he presses his face into his hands.

“I didn’t ask for this,” his voice comes out as a tight, excruciating whine. It might be pathetic if it weren’t so honest; Sam tries to keep his composure, leaning on the sink. “I didn’t want it, any of it. I don’t want it now,” it’s almost a howl; Sam keeps quiet. This is the most that Dean has spoken in days.

Dean says nothing for a long time. He envelops his face with his hands, breathing hollowly, then sucks in a breath between his parted fingers, and speaks from within them. “You think there’s only one?” he says, in the smallest voice Sam has heard in a long time.

He remembers when they were kids, and Dean would fight older boys to protect him, even when they hadn’t done anything. He’d been overenthusiastic, overprotective, but never actually  _over._ All this shit piled up around them; Mom, Dad, Sam himself. Hell. Now this, and all that came before it; but Sam had never actually seen his brother sit down and give up.

He’d never seen him actually drown himself before either; maybe, in some way, he was trying to follow after.

“One what?” he asks, carefully, scared of the answer. Dean still won’t look at him.

“One –  _one._ One one,” he’s babbling. “One like – one like Jess, Jess was your one, you were gonna marry her, right?” Dean is quite obviously crying, but with his face in his hands, Sam can’t see. He allows the artifice. “Do you think he was-?” he huffs another long, desperate breath. “Do you think I’ll ever-”

Does he think he’ll ever love again, he’s asking, and Sam can’t breathe.

He’s asked himself the same question, a lot of times. Is there still something inside him even resembling love? Is there room, amongst the trauma and hatred; amongst the loss?

Sometimes he worries there isn’t room in Dean for anything  _but_ love; like he’s this dark, gaping vacuum, feeding on the rare, careful touches of other people’s hands. Like the vacuum gets darker, deeper, with each successive loss.

He was a sweet boy when he was a kid, people told him. Sweet kid, green eyes, easy smile. Loved his mom.

Sam never knew his mother; he doesn’t know if he would have loved her. He likes to think he would.

But Dean loved everyone.  _Loves_ everyone, from his demon-blooded brother to his bruiser of a dad. Never really lets  _go._

Sam worries sometimes that he’ll never love again, but for Dean he worries that he’ll never  _stop._

“I don’t know,” he says truthfully, and Dean pushes his hands up, up, over his face, into his hair. He tightens his fingers against his skull.

“I don’t know what to do, Sammy,” Dean says, and Sam is aware of how derailed this has gotten; he wanted to be the one to pull his brother up, to encircle him with his arms, but now he has no answers, no experience, no words. The two of them are different; Sam worries that his centre is cold, but Dean’s is so warm it’ll burn the whole world to ashes. Press them together, one of them always gets hurt.

“Me neither,” he admits, and Dean looks up at him from beneath his hands, now kneading at his eyes.

They stay in the bathroom for a long time, mute. Dean’s heels judder and tap against the plastic floor; Sam just leans on the sink, and breathes.

 


End file.
